When the country shut down nearly a year ago due to COVID-19, LGBT-owned businesses joined others in closing their doors. In response, the Massachusetts LGBT Chamber of Commerce continues its support for those businesses as they have since 2017.
The Massachusetts LGBT Chamber of Commerce is a nonprofit composed of hundreds of LGBT-owned businesses and large, innovative corporate partners. Its mission is to cultivate relationships between these businesses to increase economic impact.
Grace Moreno, the executive director of the organization, said the nonprofit aims to support LGBTQ business owners in pursuing financial opportunities.
“Our main goal is to put more money in the pockets of the LGBTQ community,” she said.
Moreno said its founding was made possible when Gov. Charlie Baker signed the 2015 Executive Order 565 — which said the state would take “groundbreaking measures” to ensure its businesses were as diverse as its citizens, and expand the Massachusetts Supplier Diversity Program to include LGBT-owned business enterprises.
“That gave us an opportunity to really look at why it would be advantageous now for an LGBT-owned business to certify,” Moreno said. “In the past, it hasn’t been advantageous because homophobia means that if you come out as an LGBT-owned business, some people might not do business with you … even in Massachusetts.”
Moreno said the Massachusetts LGBT Chamber of Commerce now has around 45 corporate sponsors and 200 members. The chamber also has a job board of LGBTQ-friendly businesses, a newsletter and an event calendar.
When COVID-19 hit, she said, the chamber adjusted and moved to a virtual model.
The pandemic has been a “huge struggle” for the organization to overcome, Moreno said. It has affected the chamber’s ability to expand across the state and slowed momentum on other work. Nonetheless, she said the chamber has persevered.
“Our biggest accomplishment to date was when coronavirus started,” she said. “We really honed down and became resource navigators and helped one on one most of our members to get through the process of how are they going to stay sustainable.”
When it became clear the pandemic wasn’t going to end within a few months, the chamber found more it could do to support its members, she said.
“We doubled down and really looked for other ways to help our members,” she said. “We started a 501(c)(3) with the help of some partners and raised 250,000 dollars to give out small grants to those companies that did not qualify for anything else.”
Now, she said the chamber is specifically working to do more training at other chambers in the state, helping with the second round of Paycheck Protection Program loans and supporting businesses as they continue to adjust to the pandemic.
“Now it’s been a year since corona started,” she said. “Some businesses have done great to keep their businesses alive, but other business has really struggled.”
Despite the setbacks, she said the group is now working to expand across the state.
“It’s very easy to be a statewide organization that gets stuck on this side of the state because Boston is so dense,” Moreno said. “What we have realized from our previous work is that people down at the Cape need us, people out in Western Mass. need us and people in Worcester need us.”
Susu Wong is the founder of Tomo360 — a marketing firm in Lowell, Massachusetts — and a board member of the chamber.
“We want to be a chamber that wants to help connect small businesses, LGBT businesses, with companies through procurement,” Wong said. “We didn’t want to be just a networking group.”
Wong said she has found value in the camaraderie and support the chamber provides, especially during the challenges of the pandemic.
“Having a community of LGBT owners is really nice, we help each other out,” Wong said. “For example last year during COVID, I gave some workshops [and] they were … trying to help other businesses to get funding for PPP.”
In terms of future action, Moreno said the chamber is working to push the City of Boston to be inclusive of LGBTQ businesses, which are currently excluded from Mayor Marty Walsh’s executive order promoting equity.
“I’ve been patient,” she said, “but I think it’s time for our organization to get really loud about exclusion.”
Moreno said the organization is determined to create change and create an impact on the LGBTQ community.
“We are not a traditional chamber, we are more of an incubator, think tank, doer,” she said. “We want to get things done, we want to see change … we want to push the envelope where the envelope needs to be pushed.”
This was amazing get her to do more!!!